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They have finally arrived. A couple of years after Bill Gates demonstrated an early prototype--and a couple of months after the celebrity-sprinkled Broadway launch--Tablet PCs are real, shipping products.

But do they really make life simpler for people who attend lots of meetings and record their notes on pad and paper? Do they fulfill Gates's dream of paper-killing machines for businesspeople on the go? Or are they simply niche products like their pen-based computer predecessors?

To take a hard look beyond the hype, we gathered shipping units running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition from six vendors: Acer, Fujitsu, HP, Motion Computing (now in partnership with Gateway), Toshiba, and ViewSonic. The fully outfitted devices ranged in price from $2197 to $2814 (see "Tablet Tally: No One Model Has It All," at the bottom of this page, for more details). The systems came in two basic styles: a slate-and-docking-station combo (the Fujitsu, HP, Motion Computing, and ViewSonic models), and a convertible notebook (the Acer and Toshiba units).

We lab-tested all six for performance and battery life, and sent several to business users to get real-world feedback.

Our findings: These units represent a promising start to a technology with great potential--if not for widespread mainstream use, at least for a significant (and increasing) number of mobile workers who regularly take notes and prefer handwriting to typing.

The devices aren't perfect. The ultra-low-voltage Pentium or Transmeta Crusoe chips in most of these systems aren't fast (though they're comparable to subnotebooks' CPUs). And like other portables, tablet PCs get warm with extended use. Price and battery life concerns may deter prospective buyers, and some features--notably handwriting recognition--simply aren't ready for prime time. But the units' ability to use handwritten input holds great appeal for some people who aren't deskbound.

Take Note

"I love it. I think it's awesome," reported Kymi Armour Matheson of the $2796 slate-style Fujitsu Stylistic ST4000 that she tried out at the San Francisco offices of Addamark Technologies, a small start-up company. Matheson, whose job as product manager involves a lot of meetings and some travel, is a former user of Apple's pioneering pen-based Newton, and normally works on a Dell laptop.

She especially appreciated Journal, a utility included with XP Tablet PC Edition that lets you save searchable images of handwritten notes. She found she could take meeting notes on the Fujitsu, instead of having to use pen and paper, and then quickly dock it on its station for more desktop-like use.

"It does everything my laptop does--and it's lighter," Matheson said. She also found the CPU fan agreeably quiet.

Matheson did notice some drawbacks, though they were not severe enough to dampen her enthusiasm for the product. She noted that the unit did not connect to the office's wireless network as consistently as did the notebook she typically uses. And while she liked the slate format overall, she thought Fujitsu should have included a better means of propping up the tablet independently of the docking station for times when she's on the road with just a keyboard (Fujitsu is working on this problem, a spokesperson said).

Despite having enjoyed the Newton's handwriting recognition features, Matheson did not use the ones in Windows XP Tablet PC Edition extensively. She found handwriting-to-text conversions on the fly (via the Tablet Input Panel) inaccurate, and she didn't want the distraction of trying to fix mistakes during meetings.

On the Road

Rob Dorting, a Burlington, Iowa-based account representative for a Fortune 500 consumer products company, felt that the handwriting recognition wasn't accurate enough to bother with either. But he heartily endorsed the $2199 Acer TravelMate C102Ti he tried while visiting some of the 16 chain stores he monitors.

Like Matheson, Dorting especially liked the Journal feature. As he went through each store, he was "noting items I need to go to the store director about," he said. "Normally, I'd just take a legal pad."

In Dorting's opinion, the tablet would be an even more useful productivity tool if his company ported some of its customized apps to the OS. Currently, he has to create voluminous reports and checklists on paper and then mail them to his company--a time-consuming process that would be streamlined if he could walk store aisles with a tablet in hand that already contained the proper electronic forms.

He had criticisms, too. Windows XP's voice recognition technology, even after training, worked poorly when he tried to dictate memos. And since he's often on the road for several hours a day, he said he would have appreciated a longer battery life (in our tests, battery life for the Acer was 2 hours, 54 minutes).

Still, Dorting decided, "For what I do, it would be really helpful, and it would save a lot of time and money??A?A|. You can justify the price pretty easily."

Not all of our testers agreed. Karen Kajmo, a Needham, Massachusetts??A?A?based product manager, said she needs to type, format, and distribute meeting notes to coworkers. But the handwriting-to-text conversion was not accurate enough for her, so the Motion Computing M1200 ($2814 including docking station and CD-RW/DVD combo drive) she tried wasn't useful.

"I felt like I had a warm, expensive Etch A Sketch," Kajmo said of the slate-style unit, referring to the natural tendency of Tablet PCs to heat up. "When I made a mistake, I wanted to pick it up and shake it.... My general impression is that it's really fun, but I don't find it particularly useful, especially at the price point."

Pediatrician Sheena Apun of Babylon, New York, said that she would have difficulty justifying the cost of a tablet for her private practice even though she enjoyed using Hewlett-Packard's Compaq Tablet PC TC1000 ($2197 including docking station and CD-ROM drive) to take and organize notes, mostly from telephone calls. "I like it, but not enough to purchase one for my own use," she said. She added that for her practice, it's easier to maintain patient files on paper.

Still interested in tablet-shopping? The wide range of available designs gives you some real choices.

The more work you do away from the desk where you'd keep a docking station, the more you might find a convertible handy. Though you can bring a keyboard to attach to a slate when you travel, you're more likely to run into problems propping it up.

HP's Compaq tablet skirts this problem cleverly by building a swivel stand onto its keyboard. This enables its slate to behave like a convertible notebook.

Unfortunately, however, the Compaq's 1-GHz Transmeta chip makes it significantly slower than the other machines here, most of which are powered by 800-MHz or 866-MHz ULV mobile Pentium III CPUs. On the other hand, the HP unit's battery life was a respectable 3 hours, 34 minutes--the highest (by 5 minutes) of the six tested devices.

The batteries in the Fujitsu and Toshiba units lasted nearly as long, with the Motion Computing tablet trailing them by about 10 minutes. The Acer and ViewSonic tablet PCs died the soonest, at 2 hours, 54 minutes and 2 hours, 41 minutes, respectively.

Power Enough

In general, we found that our review units performed on a par with comparable subnotebooks, scoring from 59 (the Crusoe-based HP) to 88 (Motion Computing's M1200) on our PC WorldBench 4 test suite of business applications. The only exception was the 1.33-GHz P-III-M-based Toshiba, which performed below average for its CPU class.

But for the same price as one of the units we tested--$2100 to $2800, including such basic accessories as a keyboard, an optical drive, and (for the slates) a docking station--you could buy a heavier, conventional notebook with better performance. By way of comparison, the top-ranked models on the power side of our February Top 15 Notebook PCs chart--all based on 1.2-GHz Pentium III-M to 2.2-GHz mobile Pentium 4 chips--cost about the same as or slightly less than the tablets here and earned PC WorldBench 4 scores of 94 to 103.

Some ergonomic and design weaknesses distinguish certain tablets. On the slate side, the Motion Computing docking station is the only one that lacks a built-in optical drive or drive bay: You choose between various FireWire-based external drives. And the ViewSonic device's docking station doesn't allow you to pivot the display to landscape mode--a drawback for people who want a more conventional desktop experience when the unit is docked.

Of the notebooks, the Acer looks and feels like a classic ultralight (3.3 pounds) subnote, while the Toshiba takes on nearly a pound of additional weight to incorporate a larger screen and keyboard as well as a 1.33-GHz Pentium III-M, the most powerful chip in any tablet to date.

Our slate users had no complaints about their tablets' carrying weight, which except for the Toshiba hover in the vicinity of 3 pounds. But if weight is a concern, consider waiting for NEC's 2.1-pound Versa LitePad slate, due this spring.

Some industry experts believe many individuals and companies will hold off on tablets anyway, at least for a while: Gartner's Dataquest division has projected worldwide tablet sales in 2003 of just 425,000, or 1.2 percent of the entire notebook market. But by 2007, Dataquest predicts, pen-enabled systems (with or without keyboards) will account for about a third of notebook sales.

For now, few PC buyers may be able to justify the expense of a tablet. But as features are refined, new tablet-optimized software appears, and the price premium versus conventional portables declines (as Gartner believes may happen in two to three years), tablets could make sense for many contemplating a notebook purchase.